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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Decided to try a few more of this season's offerings... Honestly, for the first time in a while a season has me questioning the health of the whole industry. So much of what's on offer is so underdeveloped or so thinly written that it feels like they'll green light anything. Then again, I've heard that the working conditions over at MAPPA are so atrocious that there was talk of a walkout by the animators... so it might not be entirely in my head that things aren't going well. 'Tis Time for "Torture", Princess is one of those titles that has a really thin premise and one joke. Though at least that one joke isn't delivered the same way every time. The Princess has been taken prisoner by the armies of the demon lord and sells out her own nation as soon as she's offered comically small rewards like fresh toast, ramen, playing a video game, a hug, or evenjunk food from a vending machine. This gag is repeated two to three times per episode. Vilainess Level 99 is yet another one of those otome game villainess stories where a girl has a run in with truck-kun as is normal for isekai and is reincarnated as the mean girl from whatever otome game they were last playing only to wrong context knowledge their way out of the actual story and avoid their bad end. This is like the third one of these in this season alone. It can be funny as hell or weirdly compelling when it's done right. Unfortunately this seems to be more minimum effort copycatting of successful titles, with even the main character lamp shading how threadbare and cliche the story is.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That clinches it... 4K UHD for all, and Macross II: Lovers Again is the biggest Kickstarter campaign in Animeigo's history. 😀 I definitely agree DYRL? would raise even more... not sure it would get all the way to $1M, but double Macross II's pull at least. Well, yeah... Animeigo's Macross II: Lovers Again Alus Edition Kickstarter was a crowdfunding campaign from a reputable outfit with a proven record of delivering on commitments, conducted in a professional manner, for a product that people actually want, and with sensible backer rewards. That Kickstarter for The Other Franchise was a first outing from a company with a pretty poor reputation that's infamous for not finishing what it starts, conducted in a terribly smug and arrogant manner, for a product nobody wanted or even asked for, with ill-considered backer rewards... and as if that wasn't self-sabotaging enough, it was all for a property that'd been embroiled in a years-long scandal involving misuse of Kickstarter funds by a long-time licensee who spent years lying about it and ultimately failed to deliver backer rewards and adds-ons and had its license revoked over its failure and the reputational damage it caused. Comparing the two is kicking down so far that you're in danger of having your leg repurposed as a space elevator on the other side of the planet.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    A Sign of Affection might be my stand-out drama for this season... even if it has the bloom turned up to almost comical levels and is so excessively sweet and cute that it tastes like diabetes. It's still a fairly novel approach to a romance, between a deaf girl and a linguist, that actually takes the social, societal, and safety implications of deafness quite seriously and the potential obstacles the handicap poses in a relationship seriously. It really feels like the author put a LOT of thought into this series and I'm actually quite impressed by the level of "show your work" they're operating on. I'm also REALLY weirded out that, of all this season's offerings, the one that seems to have gone viral is Mashle. The OP for season two seems to have become quite the meme in and of itself due to how catchy the song is. The series itself ain't bad either, as a semi-affectionate jab at the Harry Potter series by way of One Punch Man... or possibly Black Clover.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    There's possibly a bit of early installment weirdness going on with the Stellar Whale-type starliner. For example, it's noted that it has enough resources to go 30-60 days between port calls... but at the same time it's said to be operating exclusively over short distances (service to planets within 100ly of Earth) and that the Earth-Eden run takes it 3-4 fold jumps to complete. Instead of being set up like a cruise liner for multi-day voyages, the interior supports the idea that it's meant for short-duration flights like a particularly spaceous high-capacity airliner instead of long cruises like a cruise liner. The only explanation I can really come up with for this is that it really is just a giant airliner, and the reason it takes 3-4 fold jumps to do what every other source claims is the space fold equivalent of a milk run is this thing's got a route like a city bus and it's putting into multiple ports every shipboard day to pick up and drop off passengers and that the onboard amenities are for the folks who have a few stops between them and their destination and can't stomach another go at the catalog of inflight movies or want something to do while the ship is embarking/disembarking passengers.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    30 hours left and sitting pretty at $369,176... just a hair shy of 5x its funding goal. 😀 Loving that Macross II is now officially Animeigo's biggest-ever Kickstarter campaign.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    For the truly aggressive calorie-counters in the spacefuture...
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The Unwanted Undead Adventurer's new episode is still pretty formulaic, but there's signs of it actually attempting to do something different and interesting near the end. The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic is increasingly feeling like isekai made for the guys who were REALLY into that one eight foot tall woman from Resident Evil 8... Tales of Wedding Rings... well... it's not a great sign that this one was marked "Mature" by Crunchyroll. That usually means "fanservice of the most shameless kind". Seems like my worry was spot on, considering there were two such incidents before the runtime even hit five minutes (three counting the OP). If the protagonist spends any more time staring at the palm of his right hand I'm going to start worrying he's gonna Shinji Ikari things up in here if you know what I mean. OK, yeah... it's almost definitely one of those. An excuse plot for an ecchi harem series. The kind where, if you take a shot every time there's fanservice, you'll be in detox before the credits roll.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Isn't it kind of the norm for a lot of properties, though? I mean, Star Trek has had what... ten movies and counting that follow on from the events of a TV series and there are supposedly two more in development. Doctor Who, Firefly, The X-Files, the 60's Batman series, a whole mess of kid's shows like Power Rangers, Pokemon, Transformers, etc. Most, if not all, wouldn't make a lick of sense if you weren't following the TV series that spawned 'em beforehand. A fair point, and well made... though my issue is less with the glowsticks themselves than the spacky twits who are usually found waving them about and making proclamations about Destiny and The Chosen One. Call me picky if you like, but to me there are few surer ways to make a character boring than establishing that they are almost literally being railroaded by Fate. It makes it less The Hero's Journey and more The MacGuffin's Sightseeing Tour. To me, a character like Mando or Cassian Andor is far more interesting because their choices actually matter. They're not some smug super who can see the future and solo a small army. They're ordinary people - well equipped sometimes but ordinary nevertheless - who can and do misjudge situations and screw up in potentially fatal ways. They're able to occupy moral shades of gray instead of the world of black-and-white moral absolutes the Jedi and Sith exist in. As a result, I'm vastly more interested in something like a Mandalorian movie than I could ever be for something like the semi-recently announced Rey movie about founding a new Jedi order.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... I don't know about that. Andor has, thus far, been refreshingly free of any members of the glowstick society and season two is likely to be the same. Rogue One IMO left it at least debatable whether that one monk was actually a force user or just working with blindness-heightened senses, and Darth Vader only shows up very briefly. IIRC, Solo: a Star Wars Story was generally free of them as well except for that brief cameo at the end. IMO, the sequel trilogy and The Mandalorian are fantastic examples of how treating the presence of force users as a narrative obligation can backfire horribly.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I can see it now... "Somehow, Moff Gideon returned..." and then the Empire invades/bombs Mandalore again.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... it's not the worst idea Disney's had for the Star Wars brand. After nine movies of the Jedi order's baggage, the last few of which have been incredibly tedious, the idea of Star Wars taking its setting to some new and different places without handcuffing itself to the agency-less glowstick fetishists definitely has some appeal. I'm not sure Mando and Grogu are the right vehicle for it, though. It's different, but it's not that different. Mando spends most of his time in the franchise's trademark Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy or in remote rural areas populated only by dirt farmers, alien raiders, and space monsters. They even issued him his own glowstick by the end of the second season and he rubs shoulders with the few remaining Jedi. For my money, I'd rather see a story that explores more of what the setting has to offer. It can't be ALL wretched hives and remote farming villages. Generic space cowboy adventure can be fun and exciting, but IMO it doesn't make for particularly memorable or impactful storytelling. If it gets made, I suspect The Mandalorian & Grogu will be an all-right-but-not-great summer action movie... kind of like the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies. Maybe this is their saving throw for the guaranteed-to-be-controversial Rey movie.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely questioning the wisdom of whoever decided the time was ripe for another season of Blue Exorcist. It took a while for me to figure out why the animation in Blue Exorcist: the Shimane Illuminati Saga looks so off. Not only is it a different studio doing the animation production work (Studio VOLN instead of A-1 Pictures)... it's been full-on seven years since Blue Exorcist: Kyoto Saga. I didn't realize it'd been so long, so that certainly explains the first episode's heavy use of As You Know. The character designs were updated from the ones A-1 Pictures was using for the previous two seasons, and while some characters came through almost unchanged others (esp. the women) had their body proportions changed enough that some of them almost look like completely different people. Not a great choice of story arc to come back in on either, considering Blue Exorcist's story was never particularly strong and they came back on what was basically a breather episode between major story arcs. The Unwanted Undead Adventurer is another one of those fantasy titles that takes almost all of its pointers from isekai without actually being one. The world inexplicably runs on JRPG/MMORPG logic, dungeons are everywhere for no clear reason, adventurer is an occupation run by a trade association and they're basically just monster-hunting mercs with an ill-defined rank system based on different metals, and the protagonist dies at the start and is reincarnated as a monster only to spend his time leveling up to reach the point of being able to do human stuff again. It's basically the exact center of a Venn diagram of Overlord and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime... just with the protagonist ending up reincarnated in the same world where he died instead of going to another. It's not bad, but it does feel pretty bland and derivative. I will say the staff did surprise me somewhat with the attention they put into correctly animating the movement of the anatomically correct skeleton.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Since it was an astonishingly slow day at the office, I got a few more episodes in... Finished Demon Slayer - Kimetsu no Yaiba's "Entertainment District" arc. It has all the same problems as the rest of the series so far, particularly its preoccupation with waiting until characters are dead or at least dying before bothering to give them any exposition whatsoever. Unlike the rest of the series, that arc actually has a fair amount of fanservice in it... a factor I had hoped the series would continue to do without. I guess someone at the publisher must've said something for the series to so suddenly switch from having basically zero fanservice to having three scantily-clad kunoichi and a barely-dressed demon woman all at once. Hopefully they'll reverse course on that now that all four of those characters have exhausted their roles in the story because honestly I think it works better without the fanservice. Also watched The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil... and boy is it forgettable. Honestly, I watched it barely an hour ago after I finished writing my last post and I seriously cannot remember 90% of what happened in it. Heaven and Hell are at war, both sides have sent emissaries to Earth for some reason as high school students, and the new devil student is captured after accidentally outing himself to the angel in class. It's so generic and unremarkable that I swear I can almost feel my memory of watching it fading. It's not good and it's not offensively bad either. It just sort of exists. Its story is the animation equivalent of the color beige or maybe that middle gray that every cubicle wall on Earth seems to be. I think I'll give it another episode or two to find its feet, but I can't see this one developing past the writing equivalent of white noise. I still have The Unwanted Undead Adventurer and Tales of Wedding Rings on the docket yet.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Started The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic... and barely five minutes in I'm already feeling like this show has lost me. If your first episode exists to grab the attention of the audience and hold onto it, all I can say to describe this one is "butterfingers". Like, ok... isekai stories always take a minute or two to establish that the soon-to-be isekai'd protagonist is a loser, a shut-in, or otherwise just kind of a no-hoper.* This series spends a good seven-and-a-half minutes on the main character all but turning to the camera and directly stating "Golly, I'm so ordinary and unremarkable I sure hope I don't have anything interesting happen to me like getting isekai'd!". Honestly, the whole premise of "Standard Western Fantasy Kingdom summons X many Japanese high school students across realities to be The Hero and defeat the Demon Lord" is so overused that it's impossible to take seriously. It was novel the first few times, but it has become a Default Trope to the point that it feels like "It was a dark and stormy night" levels of bad writing to use it. The introduction to the main storyline here is so form letter that it's actually kind of hard to watch. Really, the only thing livening the proceedings up at all is the student council president who got isekai'd with her VP and the random student seems to be getting off on it. The rest is just a slightly less lazy version of Isekai Cheat Magician with the protagonist having an affinity for a rare/obscure type of magic that he wrong-contexts into being overpowered. * Outside of the rare exceptions like Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari or The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious where the whole joke is that the protagonist is unnervingly hypercompetent, or the even rarer situations like Youjo Senki where the protagonist is a proper adult who nevertheless runs afoul of truck-kun because they decided to nitpick The Powers That Be.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Being able to cross interplanetary distances basically instantaneously and interstellar distances in only a short time is pretty darn useful, yep. High powered engines'll only get you so far, since any ship has a limit to the amount of fuel it can carry at one time.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Or Macrossnald's... that's what it was in the TV series.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Decided to go for one that dropped today, Villain-san's Day Off... a comedy about what a standard tokusatsu villain does in his copious free time when he's not fighting teenagers with attitude. It seems to mostly consist of a tall and fairly intimidating gentleman doing ordinary everyday things with an incredibly overdramatic voiceover to remind the audience of the conceit that he's a card-carrying villain when he's on the clock. It's... wholesome? A little funny, but mostly just kind of slightly silly. Also went for 7th Time Loop: the Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy. We've been seeing a lot of these otome game-type shows lately, and most of them are pretty weak stuff so my hopes are not high going in. At the very least, the production values are higher than Tearmoon Empire or I'm the Villainess, So I'm Taming the Final Boss. An awful lotta blood and dying for the start of an otome storyline though... yeesh. Lotta disembowelings too. Starts pretty much the same as all the others too... the usual "the prince cancelled his engagement for a flimsy reason and now the main girl is running off to romance the bad guy" schtick. (It is mildly amusing that the first episode is basically just a very long tale of the universe repeatedly going "Would you please stop getting caught up in a war and dying?".)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It is... but as far as we know it's never been used that way (to facilitate long-range patrols), no doubt due to the very limited range of small craft without fold capability. It's only ever been presented as an emergency measure to protect the life of a mecha's operator when immediate rescue is not possible.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Just as well, imagine the DoorDash/GrubHub service charge for a trip of 5.4 billion km...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids is pretty thinly written standard "the world runs on RPG logic" fare... it's halfway to being Bofuri but without the conceit of being in a VR MMO, with the hero being a tank who's kicked from the standard fantasy hero's party so the hero can expand his harem with more girls and discovering he's got defense skills that make him stupidly broken. It feels very... half-assed? Quarter assed even. The first episode feels like the product of an isekai/MMO series mad lib. Banished from the Hero's Party season two is pretty unremarkable stuff as well. Tomorrow over lunch I'll probably tackle Tales of Wedding Rings or The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's actually kind of depressing how many shows in Crunchyroll's Winter 2024 lineup are isekai or at least isekai-adjacent with the whole "fantasy world that arbitrarily runs on JRPG or MMORPG logic" schtick. The only titles I've found in that genre that I've considered actually good or at least interesting are the ones that subvert the genre's usual power fantasy formula... Overlord for its protagonist being an overpowered villain, Youjo Senki for its "god hates me specifically" plot and its protagonist who wants anything BUT fame and power, KonoSuba for its heroes being a pack of incredibly dysfunctional morons, Re:Zero for its unstinting commitment to reality ensuing WRT a useless hikikomori being equally useless in a fantasy world too, and Ascendance of a Bookworm for its protagonist being thoroughly uninterested in ANY isekai shenanigans (or indeed anything outside of her monomaniacal desire for books). So much of what that genre produces is so transparently derivative of a handful of first-gen plots that the whole genre feels like shovelware sometimes. Still... gonna give the season's new offerings a whirl. I've already tried the first episode of Mashle's second season and found it... ok, but not great. Weird pivot to Mash's lack of magic suddenly being out in the open with no preamble and now having to Prove His Worth, but hey... if they wanna mess with a man who could probably punch god to death over a cream puff, so be it right? Mash is just Saitama with hair, in off-brand Harry Potter. My next port of call is A Sign of Affection, a romance comedy series about a deaf college student and a young man she takes a fancy to after he helps her out with a tourist who doesn't understand she can't hear him. The shoujo manga art style shines through this one's animated art style to an almost distressing extent... the original artist clearly has a type. No judgement, just... every single man is tall, slim, with a narrow face, and big pouty lips. It's like a island of misfit boy band members. The series does take considerable care to emphasize the social complications involved in having a disability and having to explain that disability to others. The launching point for the romance seems to be that Itsuomi (the lead man in the story) consistently puts in the effort to make things easier for Yuki (the main character). It is relentlessly cute. I'm interested to see where this one goes.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's where they got the Daedalus and Prometheus... thankfully with minimal losses among the crews of both ships due to their airtight semi-submersible nature. I'd guess they'd probably leave it alone... it's not only a memorial of sorts, but also technically kind of a mass grave considering how many soldiers and civilians died there during the first battle of the war.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... at the outset, Winter 2024 doesn't seem like it's going to be a particularly enjoyable season in terms of anime releases. The one I really want still has a vague "Coming 2024" release date, but that's a movie... the Overlord movie adapting the Holy Kingdom arc. Crunchyroll's Winter 2024 lineup is still launching, but it's downright distressing how much of it is third- and fourth-iteration isekai copycat titles. There's one that popped out at me - The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids - that might as well just retitle itself Borufi: Non-Cutesy Edition. The Unwanted Undead Adventurer reads like a darker take on Skeleton Knight in Another World, which was itself a ripoff of Overlord's Men of the Kingdom arc, but also The Legendary Hero is Dead. Isekai is quickly becoming the genre I wish would hurry up and die, much like western superhero movies. There are a few good and interesting ones, but it's mostly trash. I'm past Mugen Train... but it's still kind of a solid 5/10, maybe 6/10 on a good day. It really did make me stop and do a double-take at how similar Demon Slayer's Tanjiro and My Hero Academia's Midoriya are... right down to their color motifs. Is this just the era of protagonists having to be whiny doormats?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, it probably has a lot to do with when the SF-3A Lancer II was developed and that it was developed for the Earth UN Government's concept for planetary defense that didn't survive the realities of the First Space War. The Lancer II was a relatively early development from the early-to-mid 2000's, and it was developed around the idea of fortifying Earth against a classic alien invasion scenario. It presumably would have been operating from the static space stations in geosynchronous orbit to strafe enemies as they approached Earth under the original plan, before the UN Forces reworked the plans for those space stations into the ARMD-class space carrier. Even then, it wasn't really intended for deep space use. More like a sort of a space-based game of Red Rover where Lancers would strafe an approaching enemy on their way from one station or carrier to another. The UN Forces just fundamentally did not understand, at the time, the sheer scale of the enemy force they would end up facing. The UN Forces did also introduce the QF-3000 series Ghost in that approximate timeframe, but it should be noted that the Ghost was not a fully autonomous unmanned fighter. It needed offboard command and control from a ship or control aircraft, and a few sources assert that its early model semi-autonomous air combat AI was not the most stable and reliable system around. The sheer quantity of Lancer II's the Spacy intended to deploy for planetary defense would probably have made making them unmanned unfeasible or at least prohibitively expensive relative to the uncomplicated Lancer II design.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Apparently there's a new season of Blue Exorcist that's also airing... I'd completely forgotten about that series considering how mediocre the first season was, but I guess it's still going.
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